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Friday, 8 March 2013

International womens day

The right to live without fear.

International womens day is today and i wanted to mark it in some way.

Fear can sometimes be healthy, i admit to being afraid of him in certain circumstances, most notably when we engage in s/m...its a fear that turns me on..but i know im safe. But this is not the type of fear i mean.

This is an example of fear, that no woman, girl should have.

An 11-year-old girl has written a heartbreaking letter pleading with a charity to help her avoid genital mutilation.

She writes her 12-year-old sister had been cut by her aunt without her parent's knowledge - and she fears she will suffer the same fate.

She adds: "I really hope you can help me, not to have my private cut."

The unidentified girl, who moved to England in 2005 from Gambia, is just one of 24,000 who are at risk of female genital mutilation (FGM) all over the UK.Her sister had been taken to her grandmother's house in Gambia, west Africa for the procedure. She had been afraid to report the crime because she was told "if she ever tells anyone the sprits will come and kill her immediately" (sic).

In the letter to charity Equality Now, the young girl writes how her sister had burst into tears while watching a TV program on African culture. She then told her teacher about it who - mistakenly - told the young girl to write to the charity instead of alerting the police.

Girls from the ages of four to 14 are subjected to FGM in the belief that it makes them more marriageable. The practice is common in some African countries and among the African diaspora in the UK and varies in extremes - from the removal of the labia to the excision of all of the external part of the genitalia and the stitching of the vaginal opening. The procedure is normally carried out by women with little or no medical training who uses the most basic of tools with no anesthesia.The act is commonly mislabeled as a cultural practice but is called child abuse by anti-FGM campaigners and has been illegal in Britain since 1985.

Efua Dorkenoo, director of Equality Now, told the 'Evening Standard' teachers and other child workers need to be aware of the practice and alert the police.She said: “As with other forms of child abuse, teachers need to be alert to, and report, all evidence of emotional or physical pain, missed classes from school, or any of the other common indicators of FGM. If they and other frontline professionals do this, we will get prosecutions and come closer to ending this horrific abuse.”David Cameron is to allocate millions of pounds of Britain's foreign aid to eradicate FGM - making it the largest investment to wipe out the practice which affects 150million women worldwide. There are more than 100,000 FGM survivors living in the UK.

It is horrible to think of some of the awful acts still carried out against women and girls; genital mutilation as you detail above, also forced marriage and sexual trafficking. Awful things that women need to think about and tell the world about on a day like today